Our next dram was Caol Ila. The distillery is snuggled just along the coast from Port Askaig on the Sound of Jura. To get there we had to backtrack, since there was no direct route. We sped through Port Ellen and along the A846. The peatbogs flanking this remarkably straight road play a major role in giving Islay whiskies their distinctive flavour. We didn’t stop in Bowmore, Alan said we’d return later, we simply sped on through Bridgend to Port Askaig. I was told a five-minute ferry ride to Feolin on Jura would provide me with the best view of Caol Ila. I was to picture the boat putting out, then imagine looking back at Islay and seeing the distillery just north of the ferry terminal. Once I was off the ferry, I was to climb up to the track that runs from Feolin to Inver. Looking across the Sound would provide a perfect view of the distillery with the sea shimmering in the foreground. The malt was less smoky than those from the south of Islay but still highly enjoyable.
Alan had been to Craighouse, eight or so miles from Feolin, the main settlement for Jura’s 200 inhabitants and hence home to the island’s whisky stills. However, he wasn’t a fan of the whisky produced at the Jura distillery and since it wasn’t an item on our fantasy itinerary, we simply caught the ferry back to Port Askaig. The road north to Bunnahabhain was frighteningly narrow. Alan said he would park the car in the shoreside car park close to the distillery, then we would wander north along the coast before turning west. We’d cut across the north tip of the island, a two-hour trek each way with no roads to spoil the view and hundreds of deer all around us. On the way back, we’d get a brilliant view of the distillery with the Paps of Jura dominating the landscape from across the Sound. As I nosed and then drank my Bunnahabhain I was beginning to feel tipsy.
I imagined I was falling asleep in the car as Alan doubled back through Port Askaig and Bridgend. I was tired after our long walk. The Bowmore distillery was in the centre of a planned village of the same name. Despite being on a sea loch, Bowmore is the psychogeographical – as well as the administrative – centre of Islay. A single Bowmore Legend was my seventh successive dram and my palate was shot to pieces. Alan’s imaginary journey followed its own logic, a serious whisky drinker would have concluded with the heavier malts from the south of Islay, we had started with them. Alan told me to picture doubling back once again to Bridgend, then instead of heading for Port Askaig, we’d follow the road around Loch Indaal to Bruichladdich. This is the most westerly distillery in Scotland and after I’d downed my dram, we left the pub. Alan wanted to go home alone and read. Before we parted he gave me a copy of 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess, saying he’d like to know what I thought of it. I made my way to King Street, had a bath and took to my bed.
THREE
IN MY dream I was flying and then I was running along tracks. I was the Vienna-to-Belgrade express train. I collapsed into human form as the train pulled into Budapest. The station was old and had been conceived on a grand scale but the roof was smashed and dirty. I alighted from the train and Dudley the ventriloquist’s dummy was waiting for me on the platform. We ran a gauntlet of impoverished Hungarians offering cheap accommodation before we finally made it out through the subway and onto the street. It was sunny and Dudley was using a 1989 edition of Hungary: The Rough Guide to find his way around town. All the street names had changed since the book had been published and it thus provided us with a wonderfully disorientating psychogeographical experience.
It was three hours since I’d left Vienna and I felt famished. We ate in a restaurant just off Erzsébet Körút called Pizza Bella Italia. We ordered pasta. The waitress was young and flirted with all the male customers. The room was too small for the murals of Italian buildings and a blue sky with clouds to work effectively. A red rose and a yellow banana indicated the gender divide of the toilets. I made my excuses and watched from the street as the waitress engaged Dudley in animated conversation. I was studying graffiti on a door when Dudley caught up with me. He liked the picture of a nude woman with a speech bubble above her head that read ‘GYERC EREZM AKARON AWYELK ED!!!’ This was followed by a telephone number and what appeared to be a name.
We wandered through the back streets and booked into the International Youth Hostel on Andrassy at the Octagon. Then we headed up to the Müvéz to enjoy one of Budapest’s traditional coffee houses. We sat at a table on the street. Cars thundered down the road. After paying for our refreshments we moved on to Café Mozart for a post-modern simulation of the coffee house experience. There was an enormous selection of drinks but rather than providing different types of coffee, the variations consisted in strength, amount of milk or cream and the addition of flavours. The waitresses were dressed up in 18th-century costumes and the murals on the wall represented aspects of old-time Vienna. Mozart melodies were being piped through concealed speakers. I should have pinched myself, then I’d have gained immediate release from this nightmare landscape.
After what seemed an eternity, we left Café Mozart and headed through the red-light district to a bar called The Blue Elephant. We drank cherry brandy, while the working-class clientele played chess, drank and sang. For our second drink, Dudley had Unicum, while I had a pear brandy. The tables in the bar were chipped, the whole place was in need of redecoration. Once it got dark we ventured out onto the street and there were plenty of girls around. I saw Dudley standing under a street lamp. He’d got himself up in drag. Since I’d geared up as a man, I said I wanted sex. Dudley got in my car and we drove to the river. I told him to give me a blow job. I could feel the dummy’s hands undoing my flies and sensed his irritation as he searched for my cock. I took a hammer from the glove compartment and smashed it into Dudley’s skull. There was blood everywhere. I dragged the body down to the water and threw it into the Danube.
I walked downstream to Gresham Palace, a huge building decorated with the face of Sir Thomas Gresham, the man who’d founded the stock exchange in the City of London. One of the bottom corners of the building was now occupied by Casino Gresham. I turned around and looked at the river. Dudley was bobbing about in the water close to the bank. I reached out and grabbed him. The dummy had been dressed in an 80s power suit and this was soaking. Someone had attacked the mannequin with a hammer or an axe and the head was badly damaged. I carried Dudley back to the youth hostel and placed him in a bunk. I was about to crash when the telephone woke me.
Alan wanted to meet up. I was sleepy and the conversation was confused. Through this semi-conscious fog it emerged that Alan didn’t know my name. I was quite shocked. After all we’d been at it like rabbits for a couple of days. I insisted that he’d said my name when I’d met him in The Grill. He explained that he’d said afternoon. That’s when I realised I’d misheard him. I told Alan my name was Anna Noon and he laughed. We arranged to meet in Pizza Express. Both Alan and I had garlic bread and side salads with our pizzas. We didn’t have any trouble getting a table. We met at noon, before the lunch-time rush really kicked in.
I asked Alan what he’d been reading. Explaining that he’d been attempting to compare Bracewell’s output with more recent club novels, he said Deadmeat by Q. Deadmeat had been marketed as pulp despite the author’s obvious literary aspirations. Although Q appropriated crime-novel clichés such as a narrator who’d just got out of jail, the work made formalist use of cyber, record industry and cinematic conventions. There was a very deliberate deployment of repetition. For example, an appeal for information about a killer runs as a refrain throughout the book. Paul Gilroy had eloquently defended black British identities in The Black Atlantic and other works, Q seemed to be extending this discourse. The varied inflections in direct speech was only one of the more obvious ways in which this interest manifested itself in Deadmeat. It should go without saying that Q’s notions and experiences of what it was to be ‘English’ were very different from those of Michael Bracewell, as was what he considered to be hip.
Rather than looking for clarity in his reading, Alan sought confusion. Was the clubber Q aware of the earlier English writer also known as Q and did his appropriation of this moniker form part of a conscious critique of the racial codings to be found in traditional literary discourse? The ‘original’ Q, Arthur Quiller-Couch, was an establishment man. Educated at Oxford, Q went on to lecture in classics